On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 10:10 -0400, Eric Cooper wrote: > The upstream tarball for a package I maintain is in .tar.bz2 format. > I've been downloading it and recompressing it into .tar.gz format. > This seems like a very common situation. Yes very common. > > 1. Should I still follow the section on "best practices for > .orig.tar.gz files" in the Developer's Reference, and include a > README.Debian-source file Technically it's a repackaged .orig.tar.gz so yes. On the other hand many upstream websites don't list MD5 checksums so a download would be needed to verify that the .orig.tar.gz is identical to the upstream .tar.gz anyway. And if you're downloading anyway, then using md5sum or using diff -r to see that things are identical costs about the same effort. I think that the best purpose of README.Debian-source is to document things that are not obvious. In any case, it helps to just follow the interpretation of your sponsor and the ftpmaster. :) > and a get-orig-source target in > debian/rules? Not mandatory, I think. > > 2. Should I automate the bunzip2 & gzip in the debian/watch file? I think that having a debian/watch file that makes the latest upstream (stable) version listed on the debian webpages is already very good. > > (I don't think I can justify asking upstream to publish a more > wasteful version of the same bits on his website just to suit Debian.) That is of course very true. Maybe the long term solution is that Debian supports the .bz2 format. Hope this helps, Bart Martens (non-DD)
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